Juvenile Delinquents

Growing up in a single-parent or broken home is not likely to lead to juvenile delinquency, a study by a University of Cincinnati criminal justice professor shows. Patricia Van Voorhis says she found that poor quality home life is what leads to delinquent behavior, regardless of whether the family is intact. She found that physical abuse, conflict, lack of affection, minimal supervision and little enjoyment in the home lead to delinquency.

The U.S. Department of Justice will continue for at least another year to oversee reforms at Los Angeles County's 14 juvenile probation camps, under an agreement announced Thursday. In 2008, the county's Probation Department accepted federal monitoring after being threatened with a takeover unless it did more to prevent youth suicides, stop employees from harming juvenile delinquents and improve rehabilitative services. The oversight was set to expire this month. The Probation Department was required to fulfill 41 reforms in its juvenile justice system, including improving staffing levels, decreasing violence and reducing the number of use-of-force incidents.

Morris (Mo) Freedman coaches the unbeaten Camp Kilpatrick Mustangs, who play eight-man high school football and do all the things other players do except go home after practice. That's because the Mustangs are certified juvenile delinquents, first-time offenders incarcerated for five or six months at the fenced-in county facility in the rugged Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu.

TEENS who lose their virginity earlier than their peers are more likely to steal, destroy property, shoplift or sell drugs than their virgin counterparts, according to one of the first studies to look at what happens in the lives of teens in the years after they start having sex.

They knocked the drunk down and beat in his face with paving stones, kicking him and punching him with all the viciousness coiled in their wiry boys' bodies, until his rattling grunts stopped. They watched him die. Then the three Yakovlev brothers, all younger than 15 at the time, cleaned out his pockets--although they did not kill him to rob him, said the youngest.

It was "a wild and crazy thought," adolescent specialist Ruth Herman Wells of Woodburn, Ore., recalled, the notion that "maybe, just possibly, girls might have special needs." With sturdy, grass-roots support, Oregon's Equal Access for Girls Task Force was born, and in 1993,Oregon became the first state to enact legislation addressing the serious shortage of services for troubled girls.

The San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday not to withdraw from its contract with VisionQuest, the juvenile reform program that uses cross-country wagon train treks and other challenging outdoor activities to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents. The decision to extend the contract beyond its expiration, on Friday, was unanimous and was made without discussion.

Former Budget Director David A. Stockman said today that the federal budget deficit reduction package was voted down by "windbags and juvenile delinquents." Stockman, calling the 254-179 vote an "appalling tragedy," said the deal reached at the budget summit was "a masterpiece of political compromise." The former congressman served as President Ronald Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to '85.

Some youngsters may be just a few steady heartbeats away from a life of crime, according to a USC study that links lower physical arousal traits with future lawlessness. The study of juvenile delinquents found that if it takes more to make them sweat or speed their heartbeat, they are more inclined to continue a life of crime than juvenile delinquents with normal arousal rates. "We think if you have low levels of arousal, you're seeking out levels of stimulation to bring levels to normal.

After a week of behind-the-scenes negotiations, aides to several county supervisors said Monday that a deal appears near to give a highly touted program for juvenile delinquents the money it needs to expand. Backers of the Shortstop Program had appealed a county advisory group's decision not to include the program in a grant proposal for next year. The program had asked for money to add a Spanish-language operation to its existing English-language service.

ANYONE STRUGGLING to understand the challenges and failures of Los Angeles in 2007 need look no further than the Tale of the Santee Tagger. It goes something like this: Students are harassed as they walk the two blocks from a bus stop to the Santee Education Complex. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa responds by putting a new stop closer to the school, then stages a media event to tout the accomplishment.

Authorities Thursday apprehended a second teenager who escaped from a county probation camp this week, the Probation Department reported. The teen and another youth broke out of Camp Afflerbaugh in the hills above the San Gabriel Valley on Tuesday. The other escapee was caught Wednesday. Over the last week, eight teenage inmates have escaped while under the supervision of the Probation Department, which runs the county's juvenile detention system. As of Thursday, five remained at large.

Deonta Black was hanging with gangbangers and selling weed around Perris just a few years ago, trying to scrape together what he calls a "little fame on the streets." The 18-year-old landed in juvenile hall for nine months. He was angry. He talked back. So authorities shipped him to Optimist Youth Homes & Family Services, a Highland Park group home for at-risk or abused kids -- many of whom are on probation -- to finish high school.

They pay attention when he strolls onto the campus of the high school in Los Angeles -- a man sporting white hair and beard and a jolly attitude. They pay attention when he strides into a Los Angeles courtroom too, or onto a nightclub stage -- a man wearing a suit, carrying a briefcase and toting a five-pound volume of the California Penal Code. People pay attention to every incarnation of Kenny Kahn: to the 63-year-old lawyer, to the comedian, to the teacher.

As swarms of sheriff's deputies led away half a dozen teens in a quiet Santa Clarita Valley neighborhood earlier this month, some residents stood by and applauded. For more than a year, prosecutors said, a group of marauding youths terrorized the area. Dressed as "skinheads," the thugs burglarized hundreds of cars, set off dozens of small explosives and firebombs, vandalized parks and a community center, and committed one assault motivated by racial bias, the prosecutors alleged.

Re "Looking Past Teenagers' Offenses," Personal Best, Feb. 22. Our volunteer graffiti-removal team donates their nights, weekends and holidays and much time from their families to remove the damage done by many of those that Robert Underhill entertains. While Underhill feeds cupcakes to young miscreants, we miss our dinners to scrub tagging and gang provocation from murals that dozens of good kids gave their weekends to create. Juvenile delinquent status in Los Angeles County is even more protective of offenders than diplomatic immunity.

Child abuse and sexual exploitation of children have reached epidemic proportions in Los Angeles, straining the resources of the Police Department's juvenile division with a 261% increase in cases over the last decade, the unit's commander said Tuesday. Capt. John White told the Los Angeles Police Commission that there are 14 field detectives in his division to deal with criminal child abuse cases totaling 3,346 in 1984, compared to 927 cases in 1974, when the unit had 12 investigators.

Camp O'Neal, located next to Convict Lake where the apparent drownings occurred, is a year-round institution for high school-aged juvenile delinquents, most of them spending six to 18 months there, officials said. Most of the youths at the privately owned camp were referred there by juvenile authorities in the San Joaquin Valley, said one local official. None of the estimated 50 boys now living there come from Mono County or Southern California.

Like many children her age, 8-year-old Iris Garcia was told by her mother never to talk to strangers and to stay away from gangs. She once watched a television program in which a young boy was lured into a car by a stranger and she constantly saw the problem of gangs, drugs and violence around her Casa Rita Apartment complex in Huntington Park. On Tuesday, Iris learned a few defensive karate moves, but more important, she learned the valuable lesson of being in control of her future.

She still wants to run away. But her little body is held back by an iron chain formerly used to restrain the family dog. The chain wraps around her left ankle, travels up her pant leg and dangles between her waist and a bolted lock on the wall. Her biological mother in this remote mountain village in Sichuan province does this out of desperation. She doesn't know how else to stop the 12-year-old from escaping to the city.